Nicaragua and the United States are approaching the 30-year anniversaries of two periods of national reckoning that took place in the waning years of the Contra War. The conflict erupted in 1981 just two years after the Sandinista National Liberation Front overthrew the Somoza regime, a brutal family dictatorship that had ruled Nicaragua for more than forty years. Once in office, Ronald Reagan, a devout anti-communist crusader, authorized the training and funding of counter-revolutionary forces or contras as part of a campaign to destabilize the Sandinista state. Armed resistance spread to the Atlantic coast region where dissatisfaction with the revolution grew in indigenous and Afrodescendant communities with the imposition of a new ruling order from Managua. By the end of the 1980s, the United States would extend over $400 million USD in aid to the contras, while the war and destabilization campaign would result in more than 30,000 deaths and billions of dollars in losses for Nicaragua.

What has U.S. militarization meant for the people who live in militarized places around the world?

The Contra War continued until 1990 when the Nicaraguan people removed the Sandinistas from power by popular vote. But indigenous and Afrodescendant resistance began to subside in the mid-1980s as the Sandinista state sought to reconcile the revolutionary project with these communities by recognizing their rights to land and regional autonomy. In November 1986, the state enshrined these rights in law with the adoption of a new constitution followed by the passage of an autonomy statute for the Atlantic coast region in 1987. The reforms established the framework for some of the most expansive multicultural citizenship rights in Latin America. It still took more than two decades for the Nicaraguan state to title indigenous and Afrodescendant territories. And even with formal recognition, conditions remain precarious in these territories where deforestation, land dispossession, capitalist intensification, and drug war militarization threaten community life.

Who precisely is the “common good” that the public health sector purports to serve?

by KATHERINE A. MASON

The Zika-carrying Aedes Aegypti mosquito. Photo by James Gathany of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Public domain.

It has been barely a year since the Ebola outbreak in West Africa released its grip on the frightened imaginations of the Global North, and already global health officials are in the midst of another viral panic. After spreading across the Pacific to Brazil and Puerto Rico, the mosquito-born Zika virus this summer is expected to continue its march to the mainland United States, where it will make landfall on the Gulf Coast. The message from global and American health authorities is the same as it was in 2003 with the appearance of SARS, in 2006 with H5N1 avian flu, and in 2014 with Ebola: Be very afraid.

“This could be a catastrophe to rival Hurricane Katrina or other recent miseries that disproportionately affect the poor,” writes Peter J. Hotez, Dean of the National School of Tropical Medicine at Baylor College of Medicine in a recent New York Times Op-Ed. “If I were a pregnant woman … in an impoverished neighborhood in a city like Houston, New Orleans, Miami, Biloxi, Miss., or Mobile, Ala., I would be nervous right now.” Of course, Hotez is none of the above. So are those women nervous? Will controlling Zika end up helping them? And would Hotez listen if the affected women thought it wouldn’t? As we enter another round of emergency epidemic control, these questions are critical to ask.

Public health professionals felt it was their duty to manage this threat carefully in order to serve the “common good.” But who made up the “common”?

What I have found from my own research is that even when a global disease response appears to be effective, unintended consequences can emerge that threaten to undermine, rather than support, the long-term health and well-being of vulnerable communities most affected by the disease in question. In the urban Chinese settings I studied during and after the SARS outbreak, China’s enormous population of rural-to-urban migrant workers was seen as a public health menace capable of spreading the same dangerous diseases that threatened it. In the wake of the 2003 outbreak, Chinese public health professionals felt it was their duty to manage this menace carefully in order to serve the “common good.” But who made up the “common”?

The question of what is just is not an ahistorical one—it is answered daily in the spaces of lived experience.

by SANDRA BRUNNEGGER and KAREN ANN FAULK

"Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo." May 31 2007. CC BY-NC-ND 2.0via Flickr.

Latin America is as culturally diverse as it is geographically vast. Yet, the nations of Latin America share important historical and institutional characteristics. Perhaps most significantly, countries across the region continue to grapple with the legacies of colonialism—from the classical era of Iberian colonialization to the neocolonial domination enacted through economic penetration in the early twentieth century.

At the approach of the twenty-first century, Latin Americans found themselves constrained by the demands of international lending agencies and awash in the flood of cultural and material products made ever more readily available by multinationals striving to captivate and capitalize on the “emerging markets” opened by neoliberal reform. The continent has also had to contend with the legacies of state violence and dictatorial regimes that sought to strip society of its vibrant forms of popular organizations, preemptively crushing opposition and laying the foundation for the economic restructuring that was to come.

In all of these cases, the protagonists are seeking one thing: justice.

These shared processes of emergence paved the way for a diversity of forms of resistance. In the Chilean Atacama Desert, residents have undertaken a prolonged struggle for their right to groundwater. Family members of bombing victims in Buenos Aires brought a case against the state of Argentina before an international human rights body and are still working through a slow process of attempted resolution. In Colombia, some victims of political violence are turning increasingly to the courts for resolution in the wake of devastating personal tragedy, while others reject the state’s ability to fairly adjudicate their grievances and construct instead a nonstate tribunal to consider the damages they have suffered to both persons and property.

What mysterious deaths and memory struggles in Chile can teach the U.S.

by ADAM ROSENBLATT

Chilean poet, Pablo Neruda, recording his poetry for the Library of Congress in 1966 (public domain). New evidence may indicate that the poet did not die of natural causes.

The week after I took my children trick-or-treating on the streets of our Philadelphia suburb turned out to be a time of ghosts in another place where I once lived: Chile. On November 5, Chile’s Interior Ministry released a public statement calling it “highly probable” that Pablo Neruda, the Nobel Prize-winning Chilean poet, died of poisoning soon after the coup that ushered in Augusto Pinochet’s 27-year dictatorship, and not from the natural progression of the prostate cancer for which he was being treated at the time. If true, this would confirm years of suspicion that Neruda, like the singer Victor Jara and thousands of other Chileans, was a victim of Pinochet’s violent efforts to suppress political dissent.

Chile’s Interior Ministry released a public statement calling it “highly probable” that Pablo Neruda, the Nobel Prize-winning Chilean poet, died of poisoning.

The retelling of Neruda’s death began when the poet’s former driver stepped forward in 2011 to allege that after treatment in Santiago’s Santa María clinic for his cancer, and only hours before his death, Neruda confided that he had been given a strange injection in his stomach. The path to an official investigation—which would result in the exhumation of Neruda’s corpse from his seaside grave and posthumous travel to four different forensic laboratories in as many countries—has been contentious.

Despite the Chilean government’s bold declaration, the tests thus far don’t offer conclusive evidence. The Staphylococcus aureus bacteria found in his body has no relation to cancer, but this does not conclusively prove that Neruda died from poisoning. Further tests are still needed to clarify the origins of such a potentially lethal microorganism (healthy individuals can be perfectly asymptomatic carriers of the bug), and even then we may never know for certain. For those inclined to think Neruda died of cancer—possibly accelerated by grief at seeing his country fall into the hands of a brutal dictator—and those who believe he must have been poisoned, there is no reason yet to significantly alter their version of history.

How migration to and from the U.S. is transforming notions of race in Brazil.

by TIFFANY JOSEPH

Governador Valadares, Brazil is the largest immigrant-sending city to the U.S. CC-BY-3.0via Wikipedia.

I still remember my first trip to Brazil—I was amazed by the diversity of physical features I saw among the population, a continuous range of skin tones between what Americans think of as “white” and “black.” Everyone seemed to get along well; residential segregation levels were low and interracial couples, families and friend groups appeared to be the norm. It would have been easy to believe that Brazil was a racial paradise compared to the United States. However, as I learned Portuguese and spent more time in the country, I came to realize that Brazil was a country of racial contradictions.

Despite having seemingly more “cordial” interpersonal relations, Brazil has struggled with rampant social inequality, especially between lighter and darker Brazilians. While Brazilians espoused the beauty of its multiracial population, I was perplexed every time I passed stands full of Brazilian magazines and saw a sea of fair-skinned faces with blonde hair and blue eyes upheld as the ideal image of beauty. As a black American, I began to notice commonalities between the pervasiveness of structural racism in Brazil and the U.S. while being keenly aware of the different racial ideologies that characterized each nation’s history.

In 2010 an 8.8 magnitude earthquake wracked Chile—the sixth-largest quake in the world since 1900. NASA estimates that the event moved Chile’s capital, Santiago, eleven inches to the West, and even tilted the Earth’s axis by three inches. On the ground, the shocks killed hundreds, displaced millions, and devastated nationwide infrastructure—schools, hospitals, roads, homes, and businesses—across a vast swath of the country’s midsection, paralyzing the country for weeks. Occurring at the twilight of Michelle Bachelet’s presidency, just days before the inauguration of Sebastián Piñera, Chile found itself in the grip of national catastrophe just as the nation’s top political leadership was in a period of transition.

Circumstances were dire, the outlook was bleak, and the barriers to recovery seemed staggering—yet, within six weeks, all of Chile’s schoolchildren had returned to classes; by the end of the year—despite sustaining economic damages equivalent to one-fifth of the country’s total GDP—Chile’s economy was back on track, delivering a strong 6 percent annual growth rate at a time when the world economy was still reeling from the 2008 financial crisis. Chile’s restoration proved so swift and robust that it garnered accolades from the OECD (Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development) who later that same year extended an invitation to Chile to become a full member of its trade forum.

In the past two decades, Latin America has gone through a major transformation. You could even call it a renaissance. This renaissance could continue for many decades, transforming most Latin American countries into highly developed, socially more equal and deeply democratic societies. In these societies, today’s poor and lower middle classes would be full participants in vibrant, socially progressive, diverse national cultures, both part of and very influential in shaping the global knowledge economy. Yet, there is no assurance that the renaissance will continue; Latin America is at a crucial moment. Hard work, planning, and serendipity have led us to a time and place where we have a historic opportunity to make a giant leap forward.

Hard work, planning, and serendipity have led us to a time and place where we have a historic opportunity to make a giant leap forward.

Beginning in the late 1980s and early 1990s, Latin American countries implemented national development strategies based on economic reform and democratic governance. In the 2000s, these reforms helped the region attain sustained economic growth of almost 4.5 percent per year since 2003. With hardly a ripple, Latin American economies just kept expanding through the economic crisis of 2008–2009. Two of the big economies, Argentina and Peru, have had much higher annual growth rates of about 7 to 7.5 percent.

Achieving these levels of economic expansion has opened up tremendous opportunities for changing Latin Americans’ lives and for further strengthening democracy in the region. The sustained nature of this growth has had a major impact on poverty reduction, at least in terms of how many people earn less than $2 per day, which is the way international agencies measure poverty, or $1 per day, which is the way these agencies measure extreme poverty. According to the Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean (ECLAC), based on these measures, the percentage of people living under the poverty line decreased from 42 to 29 percent in 2000–2011, and those in extreme poverty decreased from 18 to 12 percent.

On December 11, I finally received the email response I had been hoping for. It was from the Clinton Foundation and included an endorsement of Alejandro Toledo’s forthcoming book, The Shared Society:

As President of Peru, Alejandro Toledo confronted some of Latin America’s biggest challenges. Today, he shares his vision for the region’s future and offers a roadmap for promoting growth and creating the inclusive, prosperous society that is well within reach.

—President Bill Clinton

In my long career as an editor, I’ve never obtained a book endorsement from a former US president. In the following weeks, I would also receive endorsements from world-famous economist Francis Fukuyama and the former president of Brazil, Fernando Cardoso. As Toledo’s literary agent said, “This is going to be a book jacket on steroids!”

How U.S. involvement in Central America pushes children and families to migrate.

by LEISY ABREGO

There is no doubt that violence and extreme insecurity are significant and immediate driving factors in the migration of children and families from Central America today. Since the early 1990s, when the United States began deporting gang members to the region, gangs have proliferated in El Salvador, Guatemala, and Honduras—the three countries with the highest numbers of child migrants in recent months. But gangs are not the root cause of migration; they are merely a symptom of a long and continued history of U.S. intervention.

Any time Central American leaders sought to reduce poverty, redistribute unused lands, or tax foreign companies, the CIA removed those officials.

For over a century, the United States has looked to the Central American region, with its arable land and geopolitical significance, as its backyard and a source for cheap labor. In a January 1927 Memorandum, Undersecretary of State, Robert Olds declared that the United States controls “the destinies of Central America and we do so for the reason that the [U.S.] national interest absolutely dictates such a course… Central America has always understood that governments which we recognize and support stay in power, while those which we do not recognize and support fall.”

Indeed, U.S. intervention has been evident throughout the region: From orchestrating Panama’s independence from Colombia to building the Panama Canal for shorter transoceanic trade routes, to ousting presidents whose policies threatened U.S. companies’ local profits. Any time Central American leaders sought to reduce poverty, redistribute unused lands, or tax foreign companies, the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency, and sometimes also its military, removed those officials and installed new U.S.-amenable presidents. This happened as early as 1909 to remove José Santos Zelaya in Nicaragua and again in 1954 to remove Jacobo Arbenz in Guatemala. As recently as 2009, the United States tacitly supported the coup against democratically-elected president Manuel Zelaya in Honduras. In each of these cases, the region was politically, socially, and economically destabilized with dire consequences for vulnerable populations.

Fútbol has provided a unique arena for immigrants to immerse themselves in Argentinian culture.

by RAANAN REIN

Colombia's President, Juan Manuel Santos, asked Colombia's soccer coach, the Jewish-Argentine Jose Pekerman, to stay on after leading the national squad to and through the most successful World Cup in history. Pekerman is the most recent example of Jewish Argentines' involvement in football since its early days in South America.

There was no Hank Greenberg, Red Auerbach, Moe Berg, or Mark Spitz in Argentina, although this does not mean that no Jews made names for themselves in Argentine sports. Prominent Jewish footballers have included, among others, Leopoldo Bard, the first team captain and president of River Plate; Ezra Sued, a striker on both the Racing and national teams; Aaron Werfiker, stopper on the River and national teams (his fellow players had trouble pronouncing his name, so they called him “Pérez”); Miguel Reznik, who played for Huracán; and, more recently, Juan Pablo Sorín, midfielder for River as well as a Spanish team. All these figures challenge the still very common myth that Jews did not participate in Argentine football. At any rate, simply buying a ticket to a game, learning the names of all the members of a team, following the sport in the media, or rooting for your favorite team or player was enough to make you an active participant in Argentine popular culture.

Club Atlético Atlanta is a predominantly Jewish fútbol club, and still today a fan favorite for Argentina's Jewish fútbol fans; pictured here in 1936

Most books about Argentine football tend to claim that religious and ethnic differences have not been issues in Argentina's national sports. This claim is not confined to sports history. The fact is that many intellectuals in Latin America reject ethnicity as a significant analytical category (unless they are discussing the indigenous population or people of African descent), even if they themselves are part of an ethnic minority. Thus, football is presented as a channel of social mobility based on talent alone and as the sport that best represents some of the most cherished Argentine values and character traits, irrespective of the players’ ethnic origins.

Shahla Talebi's Ghosts of Revolution: Rekindled Memories of Imprisonment in Iran, co-winner (Gold Medal) of the the 2012 Independent Publisher Book Awards (Autobiography/Memoir Category), sponsored by the Independent Publisher Book Awards, and Honorable Mention, for Biography & Autobiography, in the 2011 PROSE Awards (PSP Awards for Excellence), sponsored by the Professional and Scholarly Publishing Division, Association of American Publishers.

The nation is stirring over Arizona's new immigration law that allows authorities to question anyone that they suspect is in the country illegally. Some say it's a good idea to investigate suspects while others think it's merely an excuse to for authorities to question people based on their Hispanic appearance alone.

Leo Chavez is the author of the book The Latino Threat, which investigates how stereotypes and prejudices have plagued the immigrant population and redefined what it means to be American. Chavez was recently interviewed by the Huffington Post and uses his expertise in the subject to shed light on the issues at stake in Arizona immigration.

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